Skinning blades of conventional meat skinning machines are straight and present a beveled cutting edge to trim skin or membrane from meat, poultry and fish. The blades are disposable and are replaced as soon as they become dull. Sharp blades have a longer useful life than a duller blade. However, the finely honed blades have a serious shortcoming in that if there is a wrinkle in the skin to be removed from the meat product, the blade will slice through the wrinkle rather than force the skin to be pulled down under the blade. When this happens, a portion of skin is left on the lean meat, and these skin "patches" are normally manually removed by knives or the like. Not only is this manual operation expensive, but the manual operation often causes meat to be removed with the skin patches, and this diminishes the yield of meat from the original meat product.
Because of this shortcoming of the highly sharpened blades, conventional blades are usually not as sharp as they might be. This blade becomes dull much more quickly, but it does a better job pulling wrinkled skin underneath the blade rather than slicing through the wrinkled portion.
Therefore, a principal object of this invention is to provide a blade for meat skinning machines that can be honed to a highly sharpened condition to provide ease in severing skin and which will effectively pull the skin on the meat product below the blade even when encountering wrinkled skin.
A further object of this invention is to provide an economical means for supporting a finely-honed blade closely adjacent its cutting edge.
These and other objects will be apparent to those skilled in the art.